Permanence

Mankind has never been so grand
as letters pruned by poets’ hand
would lead you to expect; perhaps
if our vision would just lapse
to lower levels, slick with slime,
where dwells no image, where dreams no rhyme,
to view the work of long-past paupers
whose letters home were not so proper-
but pleas that we would quite well know
as lustful shrieks from long ago;
the mating call wiped from the slate,
through history did not abate.
Perhaps the belief would then dispel
that the Past was romance, the Present – hell.